RTIH presents the retail technology week in numbers
Do you like numbers? Do you like retail systems news? Then this is the article for you. Including Asos, Carrefour UAE Asos, Amazon, Walmart, Starship Technologies, and Gorillas.
4% and £20 million…Fast fashion giant Asos has ended sales to Russia following the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
“We’ve been watching the shocking events in Ukraine in horror and disbelief,” the pureplay tweeted on Wednesday.
“We’ve concluded it’s neither practical nor right to continue to trade in Russia & today have suspended sales there. We’re supporting the humanitarian effort and our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine.”
In FY21 Russia and Ukraine represented around 4% of group revenue and contributed approximately £20 million to group profit.
68…Amazon is planning to close all 68 of its physical book stores, pop up shops and 4-star locations in the United States and United Kingdom.
The e-commerce giant told Reuters that physical retail remains an important way for it to reach shoppers.
It will continue to work on other concepts, such as its recently announced fashion location in greater Los Angeles and checkout-free grocery stores.
€2.5 million…Berlin-based AI startup Nomitri has closed a €2.5 million seed round led by FoodLabs.
50…Following its acquisition last year of Zeekit, creator of a virtual fitting room platform, Walmart is rolling out the venture’s tech, starting with a Choose My Model feature, to users of the retailer’s app and website.
Its customers are able to select from 50 models at launch, based on their height, body shape and skin tone, to have a better sense of how clothing will look on them.
1 and 16…Amazon has opened an Amazon Fresh store in Southwark, London, powered by its Just Walk Out technology.
Situated at 110 Southwark Street, SE1 0TA, this is the first of these checkout-free stores to launch in the UK during 2022.
It’s also the 16th such location on these shores, lining up alongside the likes of Camden, Ealing, White City Canary Wharf and Holborn Chancery Lane.
2…US-based checkout-free technology firm Zippin has announced the opening of its second store in Houston’s NRG Stadium, in partnership with Aramark, the venue’s exclusive food and beverage provider.
200,000…Alphabet’s drone service Wing has hit 200,000 commercial deliveries across global markets, excluding test flights.
Australia, which has been the primary market for testing and commercial deployment, comprises 30,000 of those deliveries in the first two months of this year.
The venture has also announced a partnership with Australian supermarket chain Coles.
Its customers can now order up to 250 items from Coles, with the likes of bread, fresh produce, snacks, meals, health care items, kitchen essentials, and toilet paper being delivered by drone in minutes.
$100 million…Autonomous delivery services specialist, Starship Technologies, has raised $100 million in the last 30 days, including a new $42 million Series B funding round led by the Japanese-Nordic VC firm NordicNinja and Estonia’s Taavet+Sten.
The Series B cash will help Starship further scale its service and launch in new cities in North America and Europe, including university campuses in the US.
An undisclosed amount of funding is also being donated directly to the Red Cross in Ukraine.
67%…Pattern has for a second year polled UK online shoppers to understand their changing buying behaviour, particularly in relation to Amazon.
The e-commerce specialist surveyed 1,000 people.
89% bought gifts online in 2021, with 67% saying they’d done so from Amazon; a higher percentage than reported purchasing gifts from omnichannel retailers’ websites (48%) or online only retailers (34%).
7…M&S is rolling out its Sparks coffee rewards programme across the UK following a trial in Scotland and Wales.
Available exclusively through Sparks on the retailer’s app, customers are rewarded for purchasing hot drinks at the M&S Café – with every seventh drink free.
43% of Brits are ditching online retailers’ checkouts at the last minute and jumping ship to Amazon, according to research by Ve Global.
$425 million…Weee!, a California-based grocery delivery platform providing Asian and Hispanic products, has raised $425 million in a funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
$12.3 million…Flashfood, a Toronto-based mobile marketplace providing customers access to discounted food nearing its best by date, has secured $12.3 million in a Series A funding round led by S2G Ventures.
5…Asos has signed a new agreement with Microsoft that will see the fast fashion giant continue to use Microsoft Cloud as its preferred cloud platform for the next five years.
1 and 3,000…Carrefour has opened its first BIO store in the UAE, featuring the retailer’s first ever café and an in-store hydroponic farm.
With over 3,000 items to choose from, the store specialises in healthy and organic products spanning from food and beverages to beauty, personal, and home care items.
£1.5 million…Praetura Ventures has invested £1.5 million into Sparkbox, a UK-based startup that uses AI and data to help retailers’ merchandising teams make better stock buying and pricing decisions.
10…Gorillas is abandoning its 10 minute grocery delivery guarantee, and is now promising to “deliver in minutes" with no guarantee of when the order will arrive.
In addition, the company is removing its logos and other advertising from across the windows of its dark stores.
$140 million…fabric, a startup that provides a headless platform for e-commerce experiences, has closed a Series C funding round of $140 million led by Softbank Vision Fund 2, with participation from Forerunner Ventures, Glynn Capital and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Norwest Ventures and Stripes.
